Free The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) by Mark Twain Page B

thing that will not go into words; it feels
like music, and one cannot tell about music so that another person
can get the feeling of it. He was back in the old ages once more,
now, and making them live before us. He had seen so much, so
much! It was just a wonder to look at him and try to think how it
must seem to have such experiences behind one.
    But it made you seem sorrowfully trivial, and the creature of a
day, and such a short and paltry day, too. And he didn't say
anything to raise up your drooping pride any-no, not a word. He
always spoke of men in the same old indifferent way-just as one
speaks of bricks and manure-piles and such things; you could see
that they were of no consequence to him, one way or the other. He
didn't mean to hurt us, you could see that; just as we don't mean to insult a brick when we disparage it; a brick's emotions are nothing
to us; it never occurs to us to think whether it has any or not.

    Once when he was bunching the most illustrious kings and
conquerors and poets and prophets and pirates and beggars together
-just a brick-pile-I was shamed into putting in a word for man,
and asked him why he made so much difference between men and
himself. He had to struggle with that a moment; he didn't seem to
understand how I could ask such a strange question. Then he said-
    "The difference between man and me? The difference between a
mortal and an immortal? between a clod and a spirit?" He picked
up a wood-louse that was creeping along a piece of bark: "What is
the difference between Homer and this? between Caesar and this?"
    I said-
    "One cannot compare things which by their nature and by the
interval between them are not comparable."
    "You have answered your own question," he said. "I will expand
it. Man is made of dirt-I saw him made. I am not made of dirt.
Man is a museum of disgusting diseases, a home of impurities; he
comes to-day and is gone to-morrow, he begins as dirt and departs as
a stench; I am of the aristocracy of the Imperishables. And man has
the Moral Sense. You understand? he has the Moral Sense. That
would seem to be difference enough between us, all by itself."
    He stopped there, as if that settled the matter. I was sorry, for at
that time I had put a dim idea of what the moral sense was. I
merely knew that we were proud of having it, and when he talked
like that about it it wounded me and I felt as a girl feels who thinks
her dearest finery is being admired, and then overhears strangers
making fun of it. For a while we were all silent, and I, for one, was
depressed. Then Satan began to chat again, and soon he was
sparkling along in such a cheerful and vivacious vein that my spirits
rose once more. He told some very cunning things that put us in a
gale of laughter; and when he was telling about the time that
Samson tied the torches to the foxes' tails and set them loose in the
Philistines' corn and was sitting on the fence slapping his thighs
and laughing, with the tears running down his cheeks, and lost his balance and fell off the fence, the memory of that picture got him
to laughing, too, and we did have a most lovely and jolly time. By
and by he said-

    "I am going on my errand, now."
    "Don't!" we all said, "don't go; stay with us. You won't come
back."
    "Yes, I will, I give you my word."
    "When? To-night? To-morrow? Say when?"
    "It won't be long. You will see."
    "We like you."
    "And I you. And as a proof of it I will show you something fine
to see. Usually when I go, I merely vanish; but now I will dissolve
myself and let you see me do it."
    He stood up, and it was quickly finished. He thinned away and
thinned away until he was a soap-bubble, except that he kept his
shape. You could see the bushes through him as clearly as you see
things through a soap-bubble, and all over him played and flashed
the delicate iridescent colors of the bubble, and along with them
was that thing shaped like a window-sash which you always see on